Novel
River of Fire
آگ کا دریا
Qurratulain Hyder · 1959
Synopsis
Over more than two millennia, from the India of Chandragupta Maurya in the fourth century BCE to the aftermath of Partition, the same figures return from one era to the next under the same names: Gautam Nilambar, the student, Champak, the woman he loves, Hari Shankar, his friend, then Kamal, the Muslim, and Cyril Ashley, the Englishman. Their destinies cross in love, war and loss, from Lucknow to Bengal and on to England.
Context
Written and published in Pakistan in 1959, the novel stirred controversy there, and the author returned to India shortly afterwards. It blends parables, legends, dreams, diaries and letters, and defends an Indian culture made of intertwined identities, against religious nationalisms. The author herself produced an English version, River of Fire, in 1998, reissued in New York in 2019. It has not been translated into French.
Who it is for
For crossing Antiquity, the Mughals, the British Empire and Partition in a novel regarded as the summit of Urdu prose.
Prizes and reception
Pankaj Mishra judged it magisterial, and the Times Literary Supplement compared it, for Urdu prose, to One Hundred Years of Solitude.